BuddyPress.org

Apologies in advance for the long post – I’m after a bit of guidance. Ok, here’s the scenario:

I used to hit mountains and hills hiking and camping, and am getting back into it. There’s a fair few friends that are interested in joining in, all with various levels of experience, but some are green to the outdoors.

I currently run a vBulletin site that some of these friends are members of. Others aren’t but are on Facebook, and others aren’t members of any social networking sites as yet.

The site I create I want ultimately to do two main things:

1) Be a one-stop shop for information, CMS stylee.

a) Give information on upcoming events.

b) Give articles/information about advice for kit (eg boots, waterproofs, layers, tents, stoves, etc).

c) Give articles/information on skills (eg map & compass, GPS, etc, etc).

d) Have a blog for relevant thoughts.

2) Encourage discussion for upcoming events and people to upload walking logs, photos, etc.

a) Allow individual profiles.

b) Allow uploading of photos and videos.

c) Allow basic forum discussion, and other commenting.

d) Allow group creations as some of my mates like mountain biking, kayaking, etc – so some will go out and carry out those activities, whilst others will just hike, etc.

I could setup some Facebook style site – but I know that some of my mates aren’t up for joining Facebook. I also know that some of them won’t want to join the vB site I already have (and it’s not really geared towards this purpose in any case).

I don’t really want to use vB, and feel that WordPress could offer a solution. I want to use WPRemix for the CMS side of what I’m trying to do (1 above). But then I want to use BuddyPress + WordPress MU + bbPress to achieve the discussion/social networking side (2 above).

I did try and setup WordPress MU + BuddyPress + bbPress, and then added WPRemix and set that to the main site/blogs theme. I setup with subdomains for users, but basically that creates some weird outcomes:

site.com > WPRemix theme.

user.site.com > BuddyPress Home theme – but no widgets setup (I thought that that should have gone to either the user’s profile or the user’s blog?).

And there were some strange authentication issues, I’m assuming cookie/domain related? I also want users to be able to use the BuddyPress theme only, not the WPRemix theme.

Anyway, would I be better off creating two sites:

site.com > WordPress 2.7 + WPRemix.

my.site.com > WordPress MU + BuddyPress + bbPress with WordPress MU setup not to use subdomains (directories instead).

Thoughts would be appreciated!

Cheers,

IB.